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Rewind. Did someone just allude to mushrooms? That doesn't sound like a promising starting point, but in Burton's light-suffused imagination, those fungoid spores acquired a joyous loveliness that sometimes seemed as trippy as the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations anthem that played out the finale. We're talking about dresses - although that's a rather inadequate term for what were more like moving sculptures - that were composed of layers and layers of hand-cut and hand-placed dip dyed silk circles.

No prizes for guessing what team McQueen - that's the 12 strong mini-couture corps in London, plus the bigger studio in Italy - has been up to for the last few months. Molto hand cutting, hand-placing and dip dying.

"They did take rather a long time," Burton laughed. "Some of the degradee (dip-dyed) dresses, such as the lilac one, had seven different shades in them and probably took three weeks to make".

The biggest surprise was how light and airy they were. Ditto the oversized Mongolian lamb coats, in blush pink or fawn, accompanied by shaggy boots. Seeing those was a reminder that it was McQueen who originated the half-woman-half-animal silhouette that has just about taken over fashion. But Burton made them look playful and feminine rather than menacing. And did someone mention boots? Burton's were extraordinary: knee high mink, with horse-shoe soles - and no heels.

That Burton is an amazing technician there can be no doubt: those laser-cut pony skin jackets with leather underlays, and the appliqued dandelions that fluttered on a meadow of white tulle or the raspberry coloured dresses with their deep feather hems and flower embroideries. Pictures won't do these designs justice: you have to get up close and touch them.

Backstage, where some of the dresses had already been hung up on mannequins, and where the models were relaxing between shows in white towelling robes and their £700 lace front white wigs, there were plenty of vignettes that could have come straight out of a museum - or a painting by Toulouse Lautrec.

It's probably greedy, on top of all this, to ask for more daywear, particularly as Burton pointed out, those laser cut white pony jackets "can all be worn with jeans, and the Mongolian fur collars are all detachable". And yes, there's plenty of daywear in the selling collection, as well as the McQ line she showed in London. But we can't help it, when it's this good, we are greedy.